So the soundtrack actually seems a little skimpy in contrast to the sprawling movie, but nevertheless serves as a great souvenir of Lagaan's grand and silly charms. The result is a four-hour musical with only six songs, amounting to only 30 minutes of music. It's as if Gowariker tried to cram three movies - Gandhi, Gigi, and Cool Runnings - into one massive omni-film. In addition to being a crowd-pleasing musical, Lagaan is also a historical epic, a romantic drama, and a ragtag-underdog-sports-team-comes-from-behind-and-wins movie. But its popularity was due less to originality than to director Ashutosh Gowariker's skillful manipulation of several familiar screenplay formulas. Lagaan was one of the most internationally successful films produced by India's Bollywood industry, and also the first to be nominated for a foreign-language Oscar.
